Edward Whittemore - Sinai Tapestry

His chin fell to his chest, slamming the helmet into his nose. There was little light from the overcast sky and his eyes were watering as usual so he was having trouble finding the path. For several hours he had been straying off into the wastes stumbling over rocks and bushes. His hands were scratched and cut, he limped from a bruised knee on one leg and a sprained ankle on the other. Blood oozed out of a jagged gash in his cheek.

The cold wind ripped at them. Joe plodded along with his head down. All at once there was a loud crash. The donkey stopped, Joe went back down the path to see what had happened.

Haj Harun lay stretched on the ground on his face next to a tall narrow boulder. He had walked over it blindly, one foot on each side, or rather he would have walked over it if the boulder hadn’t been waist-high. The rock had smashed into his groin tearing muscles and cracking bones. He had lost his balance and fallen on his head twisting a leg as he went down. Only his helmet, newly dented down the middle, had saved him from crushing his skull.

Joe rolled him over. One leg looked broken and the entire pelvic region was soaked in blood. He groaned and lay still.

That’s it, I can’t take any more, you might as well go on without me.

The leg?

Numb, it won’t move, I can’t move, my insides are all torn apart. For centuries I’ve been trying to do it, trying to go on, but this time it’s over, I’m finished and I know it. I’m too old and tired, just a miserable sack of pains, nothing but aches and more aches, no I can never move again. Oh I know you thought you could help and you did but I’m beyond helping now, I’ve reached the very end. There’s a limit after all, sadly there is. So take the kingdom, Prester John, it’s yours, and take the scarab and the safe and the sundial, they’re yours too. You know, I used to think I’d have no regrets when the end came but now I know I’m no match for Sinbad and all those other people I dreamed about, no match for anyone at all. Once I thought I could do something but it never worked out. That cobbler and that man on the top of the steps who doesn’t even know I’m there, they’re the only ones who will listen to me, you’re right about that. Other people just beat me, they always have. They beat me because I’m foolish. They call me a fool and I know I am. Just an old fool who has never done anything, never accomplished one thing, nothing at all.

Stop this now, said Joe. Stop it right here. The city depends on you, it’s survived because of you. Where would it be without you to defend it? Who would rebuild it? How would it keep growing higher? What would happen to the caverns?

Haj Harun sobbed quietly.

No, I wanted to think all those things but they’re not true. You know my wives were probably right after all, I should have been content to live like other people. I was comfortable, there was more than enough to eat and I was never cold, and since then I’ve done nothing but starve and shiver and never sleep, never get any rest at all because my gums hurt so much when I lie down. And they warned me, I don’t deny it. Don’t be a fool, they said. Why give up everything for this hopeless mission? Do you want to be cold all the time? Do you want to starve? You must be mad.

Haj Harun’s crumpled figure was all but lifeless. He lay on the stony ground gasping painfully for breath, his face smeared with blood. Blood and rust filled his eyes. The circle of blood below his waist was spreading. The broken leg was bent awkwardly to one side.

Joe knelt holding the old man’s hands, which were so cold it frightened him. His pulse was uneven and growing weaker.

It couldn’t be. Was the old warrior really dying?

A sudden warmth fell on his shoulders. He looked up. The sky had opened and a fierce wind was peeling the clouds back over the hills. Directly above them, lit by the sun, was Jerusalem.

Look, he shouted.

Haj Harun’s lips moved. There was a gurgle deep in his throat.

It’s no use, I can’t see. I tried and failed and it’s over.

No, look.

He gathered Haj Harun up in his arms and wiped the blood and rust out of his eyes. The old man’s head rolled back. He gasped.

Jerusalem.

Yes.

Right there.

Yes.

Haj Harun struggled out of his arms. He crawled to his knees and planted one foot. He grasped the boulder and pulled himself up never taking his eyes off the mirage above him. Wildly he lurched away from the boulder, slipped and nearly fell but somehow kept going, staggering and coughing and spitting, cackling and stumbling, half naked on his spindly crooked legs tottering up the hillside, laughing and trailing blood and no longer caring whether he was on the path or not, waving his arms frantically as he yelled.

I’m coming, wait I’m coming.

Once more a dream and a place to dream.

THE BLEAK FIRST MEMORIES better to be forgotten as they had been for forty years.

A farm in Pennsylvania where she was born toward the end of the century, her poker-playing father gone before she knew him, abandoning his wife and child to go west. Her mother managing a few years before she swallowed a dose of Paris green in despair and when that didn’t work went out to the barn and hanged herself.

Maud hungry and thinking it was time for supper, calling her mother and going to look, stepping through the open barn doorway with a little skip.

A taut stiff rope. A straight stiff body hanging in the shadows.

Screaming and running, too young to understand everything could be taken away by a footstep through a doorway. Running and screaming, Why have they left me?

The desolate mining town where her silent grandmother lived alone, an old Cheyenne woman whose husband had been a murderer, sent away. The old Indian woman not saying a word for days at a time, her face flat and dead behind the counter of the small saloon she ran, a dark filthy place where little Maud poured beer at ten o’clock in the morning and stared at the tense blackened faces of the miners as they whispered about another broken lift cable and mangled bodies three hundred feet below the ground, learning arithmetic by adding up what the exhausted miners drank.

An ugly world and she was frightened. People left you, why? What had you done? Everyone always went away and there was no one to trust, so she dreamed. At home alone she took off her clothes and danced in front of a mirror, dreaming, because dreams alone were safe and beautiful.

All else was grime and coal dust and dangling ropes, old women who never spoke and murderers who never came back and haggard worn-out faces, hopeless whispers and the terror of doors and footsteps.

She worked hard to escape, to become the best skater in the world, it was her whole life as a child. The clean white ice sparkled as she flew across it on the glittering hard surface of her dream, a still silent surface so white and yet so thin above the swirling currents of life that could spin ever deeper into blackness and a blind world of twisting creatures unknown in a young girl’s dreams.

She won competitions and more competitions and when she was only sixteen she was chosen to join the future American Olympic team that was going on an exhibition tour in Europe. The year was 1906 and the first exhibition was in the resort town of Bled, which was where she met a man with the curious name of Catherine and where it all began.

A strange name for a strange man, a rich Albanian who was the head of one of the leading Albanian clans, whose native tongues were Tosk and Gheg, who lived in a seventeenth-century castle.

Tosk and Gheg, a castle in a mysterious land. Within a week she left for Albania with Catherine Wallenstein to become his wife.